Teacher preparation and performance in high-needs urban schools: What matters to teachers * Peshe Kuriloff * , Will Jordan, Danielle Sutherland, Annette Ponnock Temple University, College of Education, USA highlights  Teacher quality is key to student achievement and school success.  Teachers feel unprepared for the rigors of teaching in low-performing urban schools.  Teacher performance in urban schools does not vary by preparation program.  Teacher performance is highly influenced by school settings.  Mentoring and community matter most to teachers. article info Article history: Received 28 September 2018 Received in revised form 28 January 2019 Accepted 2 April 2019 Educators and policymakers agree that teacher quality has more impact on student achievement than any other factor (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996). Teacher quality matters more than curriculum and more than physical environment. It even matters more than the resources available, the quality of school leadership, and the school climate, which have all been shown to be important factors in achievement (Darling- Hammond, 2002; 2006). Yet improving teacher quality is one of the most challenging goals of education reform. In order to achieve the goal of ensuring high quality teachers in all schools, policymakers are scrutinizing teacher preparation, assuming some programs must do a better job of preparing teachers than others and that some practices are more likely to lead to higher quality teacher performance in the classroom. Re- searchers have examined various factors as influences on teacher quality, including the characteristics of those who select teaching as a career, but there is no consensus about what pathway, what type of preparation, and what features of preparation programs impact teachers’ ability to promote student learning (Cochran-Smith, 2005), especially in the context of high needs urban schools. 1. Teacher preparation for diverse settings While state education agencies control much of the curriculum for teacher preparation programs including the extent of field ex- periences, schools of education create signature pedagogies that they believe optimally position their graduates for effective class- room practice. Typically, however, internal program development for teacher education is based on new research and theory regarding how students learn and the best ways to teach them, not on evidence of their graduates’ performance in classrooms. Schools of education also respond to the changing policy landscape affecting curriculum and assessment, such as the national push to implement Common Core standards and the adoption by many states of a standardized teacher certification process requiring mastery of certain types of teacher tasks. To test the theory of action that teacher preparation programs matter, we designed a study to identify, survey, observe and interview graduates of eight different institutions who taught in Philadelphia schools over a ten-year period. We suspected that high needs school settings would test teacher preparation in ways that could undermine the integrity of their best practices and state- mandated features. Consistent with well documented patterns of teacher placement in Philadelphia and other urban centers, new teachers often encounter high needs schools as they enter the profession, schools that do not function at the same level as those students experience in teacher preparation. We understood that those challenging settings would play a role in teacher quality measures, but we were struck by how prominent a role they played. * This study was funded by a grant from the William Penn Foundation (Grant # 46-15). Brooke Hoffman acted as a research assistant, and the authors thank her for her contributions. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: kuriloff@temple.edu (P. Kuriloff). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Teaching and Teacher Education journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2019.04.001 0742-051X/© 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Teaching and Teacher Education 83 (2019) 54e63